Core Faculty

core faculty

SCROLL DOWN

Core Faculty

core faculty

The Global Center for Advanced Studies works with some of the most respected philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, artists, and activists around the world. Our aim is to bridge the best thinkers within the academy with new writers that are breaking all of the traditional boundaries.

Joined Core Faculty

Alain Badiou

alain badiou

Alain Badiou

alain badiou

Alain Badiou, PhD

Alain Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, was the GCAS Honorary President (2015) and was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He is widely considered to be the greatest living philosopher.

He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great ‘antiphilosophers’ (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L’Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Nahum Dimitri Chandler

nahum dimitri chandler

Nahum Dimitri Chandler

nahum dimitri chandler

Nahum Dimitri Chandler, PhD is a full professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of English and participating faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature and in the Department of European Languages and Studies and serves on the faculty of the School of Humanities at the University of California-Irvine.

His research focuses on the human sciences and in theory situated within contemporary critical theory especially on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Published Books:

X―The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (American Philosophy)

Drucilla Cornell

drucilla cornell

Drucilla Cornell

drucilla cornell

Drucilla Cornell

Drucilla Cornell is a professor of Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is a playwright and also launched The uBuntu Project in South Africa in 2003 and has been working with the project ever since. Professor Cornell’s theoretical and political writings span a tremendous range of both topics and disciplines. From her early work in Critical Legal Studies and Feminist Theory to her more recent work on South Africa, transitional justice, and the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin, Professor Cornell continues to think through new and evolving issues in philosophy and politics of global significance. Her latest title, coauthored with Stephen Seely, is called The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man.

Robert Dassanowsky

robert dassanowsky

Robert Dassanowsky

robert dassanowsky

Robert Dassanowsky, PhD

Robert Dassanowsky is Professor of German/Austrian Studies and Visual and Performing Arts, and Director of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and works as an independent film producer. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA, where he has also taught as Visiting Professor. He is a delegate of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Fellow of the UK Royal Historical Society, and a member of the Austrian Academy of Film, and the European Film Academy (EFA). A former president of the Austrian Studies Association, he is currently a member of the Salzburg Institute’s Board of Advisors, and he presented the Seventh Annual Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies Lecture at the Austrian Embassy Washington DC in 2015. Additionally, Dassanowsky participated in the FIPSE/European Commission's Directorate General for Education and CultureAtlantis Project for transnational US/EU Master’s degree programing. His articles on film and culture have been widely published, and his recent books include Austrian Cinema: A History (2005); New Austrian Film, ed. (2011); Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metafilm, ed. (2012); World Film Locations: Vienna, ed. (2012); Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 1933–1938 (2018); Trip to the Movies: Psychedelic Cinema – Aesthetics and Politics (in progress). Dassanowsky serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Austrian Studies, Colloquia Germanica, Studia Germanica Posnaniensia (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań) along with several international literary publications, and is a jury member and donor for the annual Oscar qualifying VIS: Vienna Shorts Film Festival. His research and lecture areas focus on Central/European Studies, Film Studies, and topics in the Humanities.

He is also a Professor of Philosophy at ISH in Slovenia.

Rocco Gangle

rocco gangle

Rocco Gangle

rocco gangle

Rocco Gangle, PhD

Rocco Gangle is Professor of Philosophy at Endicott College. He is the author of Francois Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction and Guide (EUP 2013) and Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy (EUP 2016), co-author of Iconicity and Abduction (Springer 2017) and co-editor of Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (Rowman and Littlefield 2017). His research focuses on semiotics, diagrammatic logic, metaphysics and political philosophy.

Jane Gordon

jane gordon

Jane Gordon

jane gordon

Jane Anna Gordon, PhD

Jane Anna Gordon is Associate Professor of Political Science. She is author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict over Community Control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (RoutledgeFalmer 2001) and Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Fordham UP, 2014), co-author of Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (Paradigm Publishers, 2009) and co-editor of The Companion to African American Studies (Blackwell Publishers, 2006), Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm Publishers, 2006), Creolizing Rousseau (Rowman and Littlefield International 2015), and Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (Rowman and Littlefield International 2016). She was the President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2013-2016 and is currently completing a book entitled, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement.

Lewis Gordon

lewis gordon

Lewis Gordon

lewis gordon

Lewis Ricardo Gordon, PhD

Lewis Ricardo Gordon is Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs in the United States; The Honorary President of The Global Center for Advanced Studies; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; Honorary Professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa; and Chairman of the Anna Julia Cooper, Frantz Fanon, Nicolás Guillén, and Claudia Jones awards committees of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He was also recently Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics and International Studies at Rhodes in South Africa (2014 and 2015). His research and theoretical work are in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of human sciences, life sciences, and physics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, and philosophy of education. His recent publications include Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2008), What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham UP; Wits UP; Hurst, 2015; Swedish translation, Vad Fanon Sa, TankeKraft förlag 2016), La sud prin nord-vest: Reflecţii existenţiale afrodiasporice [Eng. Trans.: “South by Northwest: Africana Existential Reflections”](Cluj, Romania: IDEA Design & Print, 2016). He has written a few hundred academic journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, many of which have been translated into several languages, and interviews and essays for a variety of public forums, including The Mail & Guardian and Truthout, on which he now serves on the Board of Directors. He co-edits the book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought: http://www.rowmaninternational.com/series/global-critical-caribbean-thought. Gordon is also a musician. He plays drums, among other instruments, in blues and jazz bands in the Hartford area, and alternative rock with the band ThreeGenerations (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCedXg5Lmzi_RNq172eDLE3g/videos.) His website is: http://lewisrgordon.com, and he is on twitter at: https://twitter.com/lewgord

Azfar Hussain

azfar hussain

Azfar Hussain

azfar hussain

Azfar Hussain, PhD

Honorary Vice-President

Azfar Hussain is Vice President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and GCAS Professor of English, World Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a prominent Bangladeshi theorist, critic, poet, translator, and activist. Hussain is also Associate Professor of Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, while he has taught English and World Literature, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and Cultural Studies at Washington State University, Bowling Green State University, and Oklahoma State University as well. In Bangladesh, he had worked as a national weekly magazine editor, a member of a national-level left activist alliance, and as a university professor before he came to the United States.

Azfar Hussain has published—in both English and Bengali—hundreds of academic, popular, and creative pieces, including translations from several non-western languages. He has written on a wide range of topics in such areas as “third-world” Marxisms, critical theory, cultural politics, political economy, and theories and practices of interdisciplinarity, while he has also written on certain aspects of the literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and on such figures as Antonio Gramsci, W.E.B Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Maulana Bhasani, and Begum Rokeya, to mention but a few.

The author of the books The Wor(l)d in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics (Dhaka: Samhati Publications, 2008) and The Politics of Sites, Subjects, and Scenes: Micronarratives and Essays (forthcoming), Hussain has edited numerous issues of journals and magazines both in the US and outside it. Azfar Hussain is currently working on several books in both English and Bengali, a few of which are tentatively titledTowards a Political Economy of Land, Labor, Language, and the Body; Decolonizing Comparative Literature; and Marxisms in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Further, his books in Bengali that are currently in press include Samrajjobad o Sanskritik Rajniti (Imperialism and Cultural Politics);Pothon: Shobdo o Noishobder Rajniti (Readings: The Politics of Sounds and Silences); Keramatnama (Keramat’s Chronicles); and Chinho Bhashey Obosheshey (Signs Float At Last).

Luce Irigaray

luce irigaray

Luce Irigaray

luce irigaray

Luce Irigaray, PhD

Luce Irigaray is widely considered to be one of the most recognized philosophers in the world. She is a prominent author in contemporary French feminism and Continental philosophy. She is an interdisciplinary thinker who works between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics. Originally a student of the famous analyst Jacques Lacan, Irigaray’s departure from Lacan in Speculum of the Other Woman, where she critiques the exclusion of women from both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, earned her recognition as a leading feminist theorist and continental philosopher. Her subsequent texts provide a comprehensive analysis and critique of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. Irigaray alleges that women have been traditionally associated with matter and nature to the expense of a female subject position. While women can become subjects if they assimilate to male subjectivity, a separate subject position for women does not exist. Irigaray’s goal is to uncover the absence of a female subject position, the relegation of all things feminine to nature/matter, and, ultimately, the absence of true sexual difference in Western culture. In addition to establishing this critique, Irigaray offers suggestions for altering the situation of women in Western culture. Mimesis, strategic essentialism, utopian ideals, and employing novel language, are but some of the methods central to changing contemporary culture. Irigaray’s analysis of women’s exclusion from culture and her use of strategic essentialism have been enormously influential in contemporary feminist theory. Her work has generated productive discussions about how to define femininity and sexual difference, whether strategic essentialism should be employed, and assessing the risk involved in engaging categories historically used to oppress women. Irigaray’s work extends beyond theory into practice. Irigaray has been actively engaged in the feminist movement in Italy. She has participated in several initiatives in Italy to implement a respect for sexual difference on a cultural and, in her most recent work, governmental level. Her contributions to feminist theory and continental philosophy are many and her complete works present her readers with a rewarding challenge to traditional conceptions of gender, self, and body. From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Irigaray is a psychoanalyst and has practiced for many decades until recently retiring to continue writing and research.

Luanne McKinnon

luanne mckinnon

Luanne McKinnon

luanne mckinnon

Luanne McKinnon, PhD

Luanne McKinnon, PhD is an Art Historian, Theorist and Curator. She was the Director of the UNM Art Museum at the University of New Mexico.

Joshua Ramey

joshua ramey

Joshua Ramey

joshua ramey

Joshua Ramey, PhD

Joshua Ramey is currently Assistant Professor at Grinnell College and Professor of Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. He earned his PhD from Villanova University. His areas of research are contemporary continental philosophy, critical theory, political economy, and theory of religion. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Duke University Press, 2012) and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). He is also co-editor, with Matthew S. Haar-Farris, of The Enigmatic Absolute: Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and co-translator, with Edward Kazarian, of François Laruelle’s Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming). He is currently building Rogue Scholars, a solidarity network and decolonizing education project with fellow GCAS Core Faculty member Cleo McNelly Kearns.

Cleo Kearns

cleo kearns

Cleo Kearns

cleo kearns

Cleo McNelly Kearns, PhD

(Ph.D, Columbia University)

(Ph.D, Columbia University) is an independent scholar in the fields of modern literature, philosophy of religion, and comparative theology. She has published extensively on issues in continental philosophy, feminist theory and anthropology and has recently completed a major study on the figure of the Virgin Mary and the discourse of sacrifice in and among the monotheisms. Her current project, which is called Shamanism and its Discontents, examines shamanism and neo-shamanism as practices of transformation and resistance. She is the author of T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (1987) and The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice (2008), both from Cambridge University Press. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology, and she has contributed reviews and essays to a range of publications from History of Religions to the Oxford Handbook on Literature and Theology. Dr. Kearns has held fellowships from the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion and the Center of Theological Inquiry and has served as a Visiting Professor at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She is a founding member of the Theology and Continental Philosophy section of the American Academy of Religion.

Julie Reshe

julie reshe

Julie Reshe

julie reshe

Julie Reshe, PhD

Julie Reshe is a leading researcher in psychoanalysis and professor of philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies where she directs the Institute of Psychoanalysis. She completed her PhD under the supervision of Alenka Zupančič at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She works at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysys and neuroscience, her research topics include sexuality, emotions and cognition, childhood, and trauma studies.

Giovanni Tusa

giovanni tusa

Giovanni Tusa

giovanni tusa

Giovanni Tusa, PhD

Giovanni Tusa is a philosopher and media researcher based in Paris and Madrid. He has studied in philosophy, contemporary arts, cinema in Italy, Barcelona, London, Cuba, Russia, Canada. As a documentary filmmaker and video artist, Professor Giovanni Tusa has had his works screened in Cuba, London documentary film festival, Biennale della Danza in Venice, Coimbra and Paris. Giovanni has been Research Fellow at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in France, where he collaborated with other researchers from institutions all over the world. His research interests include Deconstruction and resistance, Derrida, Heidegger and the being-away of the living, archives and the spectral heritage, Antonio Negri and the politics to come, Jean-Luc Nancy and the limit of absolute singularity, cinematic language and the violence of editing, Deleuze and nomadic hope, architecture, contemporary cinema, Pasolini, parasitism, and animal philosophy.

Tere Vadén

tere vadén

Tere Vadén

tere vadén

Tere Vadén, PhD

Tere Vadén is a philosopher currently working in the School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland, and the multidisciplinary research unit Bios.fi that focuses on anticipation of deep socio-ecological transformations. He has published several articles on the philosophy of mind and language, as well as co-authored the books Rock the Boat. Localized Ethics, the Situated Self, and Particularism in Contemporary Art (2003), Wikiworld (2010), and Heidegger, Zizek and Revolution (2014). Together with Mika Hannula and Juha Suoranta, he has worked on the methodology of artistic research (Artistic research. Theories, methods, practices. (2005) and Artistic research methods. Narrative, Power, and the Public. (2014)). Recently he has been obsessed with the question of energy, especially fossil fuels, and their impact on the experience of modernity, publishing with Antti Salminen the book Energy and Experience. An Essay in Nafthology (2015). Tere is also a long-time editor of the Finnish philosophical journal niin & näin and managing director of the activist hedge fund http://robinhoodcoop.org

Corey D. B. Walker

corey d b walker

Corey D. B. Walker

corey d b walker

Corey D. B. Walker, PhD

Corey D. B. Walker

Vice President, Dean and Professor of Religion and Society

A scholar of African American social, political, and religious thought, Dean Walker has published broadly on African American religion and philosophy, African American history and culture, and religion and American public life.

Dean Walker is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press) and has completed the manuscript for his next book entitled Between Transcendence and History: An Essay on Religion and the Future of Democracy in America. He is editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures” and Associate Editor of the award winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity. He has published over fifty articles, reviews, book chapters, and essays appearing in wide range journals such as Amerikastudien/American Studies, boundary 2, Cahiers Charles V, C.L.R. James Review, Journal of American History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Dean Walker co-directed and co-produced the documentary film fifeville with acclaimed artist, filmmaker, and University of Virginia professor Kevin Jerome Everson. Dean Walker has served as Book Review Editor and as an Associate Editor of The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, generally considered the top academic journal in the field.

Before assuming his current position, Dean Walker was Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business and Education and inaugural John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston-Salem State University. Previously, Dean Walker served as chair of the department of Africana Studies at Brown University where he was also a tenured professor. He was also a faculty affiliate in the department of American Studies, department of Religious Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and Committee on Science and Technology Studies. Dean Walker also served as a faculty member in the department of Religious Studies and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He was the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge established by the Carter G. Woodson Institute, with support from the Ford Foundation, as the only research center in the country dedicated to new and innovative research related to the concept of local knowledge. Dean Walker also served as a visiting professor at the Historisches Institut at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena in Germany where he delivered the Johann Gustav Droysen Lecture.

Dean Walker has long been involved in civic affairs including serving as Vice Rector of the Board of Visitors of Norfolk State University and as a member of the Workforce 2000 Advocacy Council for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project. Most recently Dean Walker served on the Board of Directors of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Board of Directors of the RiverRun International Film Festival, Board of Trustees of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. He was a champion of the Winston-Salem Community Innovation Lab. and member of the Advisory Boards of the Flywheel Foundation, Project Impact, and UNC-TV’s Black Issues Forum. He has appeared on a variety of radio and television shows and has served as guest commentator for a number of media outlets in the United States and abroad.